Though it’s a little odd that none of the Point Place teenagers we meet are inspired (or forced) to attend summer jobs — Jay has worked one video store shift — something That ’90s Show has captured reasonably well so far is the pleasing buzz of aimlessness that comes with a responsibility-light summer. That’s especially true in “Summer Storm,” which weaves its characters together better than most episodes so far, using an intentionally constricting premise: It’s raining, and no one wants to go outside.
For Kitty, this means working extra hard to get around Red as she endeavors to clean out the house; Sherri agrees to distract Red by luring him over to her place with fix-it tasks. For Leia, this means hanging out in the basement (so, kind of like a nice, sunny day) and humblebragging about her “embarrassing” and completely invisible, possibly nonexistent hickey. This prompts Nikki to ask about whether she’s, you know … touched it, which sends Leia into a spiral of self-consciousness. Gwen tries to convince her not to get wound up in expectations — “there are no rules to any of this” — but Nikki still gets in Leia’s head, to the point where she sticks her arms out “like a ski-jumper” or possibly “like a baby who doesn’t want to get picked up” when kissing Jay.
But there are more pressing matters at hand: In a frenzy of basement cleaning, Kitty grabs an old dog-treats tin (R.I.P., never-seen Forman dog), where Jay has hidden The Stash. The gang’s pot box is immediately subsumed into a mass of identical packing boxes, so the gang splits up for an undercover search in the guise of helping Kitty sort through and pack the household junk she wants to donate. While their friends search, Nikki tries to repair the damage she’s done to Leia’s poor new-girlfriend brain, explaining that hips are a safe middle ground for hand placement during romantic clinches. She also confides that she and Nate are experiencing the fallout from the last episode’s conversation about their uncertain future, having dumb fights about things like tornado safety.
It’s a big episode for Nate being a dumb lummox: mistaking Kitty’s appreciation of his help for sexual interest, feeling uncertain over a straightforward description of a wooden moose, and getting furious at Gwen for taking a shirt his dad sent that doesn’t fit him. They fight a bit and then bond over missing their respective dads, who are not exactly out of the picture, but both have work that keeps them away from their kids most of the time.
With the siblings getting maudlin, it’s up to Jay and Ozzie to find the pot — which they do in the garage, where Jay places it in the pocket of Red’s old jacket, promptly losing it again when Red appears to snatch it back. He isn’t about to part with something he paid full price for at Sears in 1964. (Honestly, I could have gone for a more extensive index of where and when Red purchased various past-prime household items. Spare a little runner for me, sitcom? Please?)
Before Jay sets out to retrieve the weed (again), he plants one on Leia, allowing her to try out the hand-hip move. It works great until she’s startled and jostled into laying a hand on his junk (albeit, you know, over the jeans). Callie Haverda’s cautious, contemplative reaction — so thoughtful she doesn’t actually move her hand away, like she needs to be mindful of a fragile explosive, or is wondering if he’s noticed — is more proof that she’s the best physical comedian of this cast, which is especially impressive given the longer filmographies of some of the others. Eventually, she takes her hand away. In what is becoming a rich tradition for this show, there’s never really any doubt that Jay will be chill about the whole thing, but the show goes through those motions anyway.
The obligatory slapstick is more fun. Jay and Ozzie find Red’s jacket over at Sherri’s, but correctly sense it might be a trap just before they walk into a series of mousetraps laid by Red after Sherri pretends to see a mouse as a stalling tactic. It’s a funny bit of slapstick, only slightly hampered by the visual fudging of not showing most of the traps.
Having retrieved their stash, the gang comes together for another pot circle, and the episode — cleverly? Stupidly? I can’t really decide — contrives to have them frolic outside in the post-rain warmth, with Ozzie dressed in an old bee costume he found in the garage. Naturally, Blind Melon’s “No Rain” scores the scene. It’s sweet, in a loopy way: all summer in a montage. But Sherri breaks the reverie, arriving to pass out school schedules. It turns out, just like alternative rock, summer break is almost over. (So yes, this episode’s twist is that, apparently, no one has any idea what day it is.) I doubt this will be the solution, but it would be fun if the show took advantage of its streaming-shortened seasons to turn into a summer check-in show: Each year, Leia can visit Point Place and experience the bittersweet passage of time! That kind of long-term plan isn’t on Leia’s mind right now; she’s thinking about how her sitcom-ready new life could be abruptly canceled.
Hangin’ Out
• Nate, on finding the weed: “We should go to the cops and ask to borrow one of those drug-sniffing dogs.” He’s either very dumb, or the show is portending his future writing a decidedly not-famous SNL sketch.
• Is Kurtwood Smith using a cane in this episode for verisimilitude following the bike accident with Sherri that closed the previous installment? Or was that detail added to explain a cane Smith needed to use? It seems odd to outfit Red with a cane during an episode where he’s running around fixing everything in sight, so I tend to assume it’s the latter. It’s easy to forget Smith is nearly 80 because, until this episode, he hasn’t come across as frailer than his 25-years-ago self — and also because he’s one of those great character actors who’s always kinda looked the same. I don’t have the encyclopedic That ’70s Show knowledge to say for sure. Still, I’d guess he’s supposed to be playing a little younger as Red, because Debra Jo Rupp is eight years younger than he is. If he’s really supposed to be around 55 when the original series starts, he would be a relatively old dad for the time period, having had Eric at 38. (Eric is supposed to be 38, and his kid is already 15.) Even aged down a bit — say that Red and Kitty are supposed to be 45 or so when ’70s starts — and accounting for Eric’s older sister Laurie, the Formans got a slightly later start for a traditional family in 1976. In related news, I obsess over age-discrepancy details as a roundabout way of dealing with my own mortality!
• Though there’s probably something weirdly othering about Ozzie’s seeming detachment from the gang — he’s paired with a variety of characters, seemingly because he has no particular opinion about who he prefers to spend time with — I do enjoy the running thread that he’s seemingly willing to throw anyone and everyone under the bus at any given moment. Before it’s even clear that Red will find their stash, he’s readying his deniability.
• It feels kind of out-of-character that Kitty would impassively watch Gwen and Nate scuffle with each other, in her kitchen no less, without intervening.
• ’90s reference watch: A brief discussion of sex scenes in Jean-Claude Van Damme movies comes to a head with Hard Target, and a chest bump, plus a recreation of the “No Rain” music video; the writers are doing a great job staying on the correct side of the August 1995 dividing line, but this episode’s 1993-ish reference points made me pine for the show to get a little closer to the danger zone, especially after offering a sweet hit of Collective Soul mediocrity a couple of episodes back. “Lump” by the Presidents of the United States of America came out on August 8, 1995, guys!
